Truth and lies in Putin's Russia

Truth, as they say, is always the first victim of war. But the sheer enormity of the porkies being spread in Russia boggle the mind. 

The country has already had at least eight years of highly-censored, state-directed media to drill Putin's idiosyncratic personal vision of the country and the world into the minds of the Russian public, and the propaganda has only intensified since the invasion of Ukraine. So, the Russians could be perhaps forgiven for being so gullible and credulous, brainwashed as they are. 

The Russian media is severely circumscribed in what they can report and how they can report it. Most of the main media organizations are owned by the federal government anyway, and they are specifically "obliged to only use information and data they have received from official Russian sources". Fake video footage, both sophisticated and sometimes embarrassingly unsophisticated, is commonplace on Russian TV and social media. Most Russians apparently have no idea that a full-scale war is taking place on their western flank, involving tens of thousands of soldiers and causing thousands of deaths on both sides.

Since the invasion began, most of the very few independent media outlets left in Russia have been closed down or severely censored; the Internet, particularly Facebook and Twitter, has been muzzled; hot-button words like "war", "invasion" and "attack" have been banned in news reports; and, most recently, the Russian Duma has passed a law criminalizing the intentional spreading of anything that Mocow considers "fake news", under pain of a 15-year prison sentence, leading to the suspension of Russian services by the BBC, CNN, CBS, Deutsch Welle, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, among others.

Consider just some of what the Russian people are being fed:

• There is no invasion of Ukraine - there is a "special military operation" designed to quell a "genocidal" armed uprising against Russia (yes, it is Russia that is being attacked by Ukraine!), specifically that Ukraine is targeting and killing Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.
• Ukraine is committing genocide against ethnic Russian residents in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, a claim that has been roundly dismissed by the International Court of Justice.
• For that matter, there is no Ukraine - Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same people, and the so-called "state" of Ukraine is merely a product of foreign interference (this is a line that Donald Trump has also taken up).
• Russia is not bombing Ukraine - Putin told German Chancellor Scholz recently that Russian troops are not shelling Ukrainian cities, and that any reports to the contrary are "gross propaganda fakes".
• Specifically, Russia is not targeting or hitting civilian infrastructure - all the pictures and videos suggest otherwise.
• For the longest time, Putin denied that Russia was planning to invade Ukraine - the build-up of troops on the Ukrainian border were merely engaged in war games and practice drills, and when they eventually did cross the border it was only as "peacekeepers".
• Putin's main stated intention is to "de-nazify" Ukraine - this is a throw-back to WW2, although it is still not clear what he means, especially given that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish and lost relatives in the holocaust, the country is much closer to a functional parliamentary democracy than Russia is, and one the very first Russian airstrikes damaged the Babyn Yar holocaust monument.
• Russia is claiming that Ukraine has taken Indian students hostage and is using them as human shields, a common ploy in Russian disinformation campaigns.
• Putin has accused Ukraine of building a "dirty bomb" to use against Russia - for some reason, he thinks that Ukraine is building a "plutonium-based dirty bomb nuclear weapon" at the mothballed Chernobyl nuclear plant (or so he says).
• The war is NATO's fault not Russia's - Putin maintains that NATO lured him into a war he did not want by expanding its influence ever eastward, and that he is merely responding to an ever-increasing threat to Russian interests.
• Ukraine and the USA has been carrying on a secret military biological warfare programme for years - neither Ukraine nor the USA seem to know what this programme is, and Russia (which DOES have chemical and biological weapons and a sad history of using them) has failed to provide any evidence. (It gets better: the chief spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defence has claimed that the US has trained an army of migratory birds to carry those Ukrainian bio-weapons into Russia. I kid you not.)

"Orwellian" doesn't even come close. Some or all of these things may or may not be Putin's actually beliefs, despite the internal inconsistencies, and that just makes it all the scarier.